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Subversive Performances, Masculine Pleasures
the young clerk decked out in the apparatus of the toff, graduating from the
protective cluster of his own kind at the side bar to the public glory of a seat at the
singer’s table.” 83 Gesture and dress, Bailey infers, were further heightened by the
architectural setting itself, which in many halls employed the illusory effects of
mirror glass. This clearly harked back to the fitting out of the gin palaces from
which many halls had evolved, but besides increasing the sense of palatial
grandeur, mirrors also intensified an atmosphere of critical surveillance, both of
others and of the self. “All round the hall” remarked a review of the refurbished
Middlesex in 1872, “handsome mirrors reflect the glittering lights, and offer
abundant opportunities for self-admiration. As the lion comique paraded his
fashionable self on stage, members of his audience could with a sidelong glance
decide how their image matched up to that of their hero.” 84
Music Hall Performance and Conspicuous Consumption
Bailey stresses the way that social distinctions were maintained, albeit in a very
fluid manner, in the organization and use of music hall space. Yet while it is true
that pricing policies and the retaining of exclusive areas protected the elite from
the touch, though not the gaze, of the hoi-polloi, an overriding rhetoric of leisured
display in the decor, dress codes, and stage presentations, which often crossed
social boundaries, also encouraged a more comprehensive mode of music hall
fashionability that affected all classes of man. Dion Calthrop in his autobiographical
Music Hall Nights attested that
our music hall people love color, gold and crimson and marble with its glittering
reflections. They like the red curtain with its big tassels; they like plenty of light, a big
chandelier, brass in the orchestra, looking glasses everywhere and attendants in livery.
If a singer wears a diamond stud they like it big enough to be seen from the gallery. They
are hearty in their tastes and quite right too. They use words which make the middle
classes squirm, but are interesting to the cultured man because he uses them too. 85
This promotion of an inclusive, indeed “parasexual” masculine style associated
with the glamorous escapism of the music hall promenade fed outwards in three
directions, to the representations of masculine fashionability paraded on the stage,
into the public world of commerce, and through to the life of the streets. As the
department store and woman’s magazine provided a complete template for finde-siècle
versions of fashionable femininity, so the music hall fed the consuming
desires of men in a manner which often prioritized their gender over their class in
an open celebration of sybaritic pleasure. As Percy Fitzgerald noted:
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